Recently in linux Category

I have historically had several servers at Layered Tech. They recently raised their prices, and the prices for several friends who have hosted servers there. The majority of our use is low volume, experimental sorts of things, and so we decided to go in together on a larger box that we could virtualize.

Anyhow, with that done, I got to work actually setting up Xen virtual server instances. The host box (aka the Dom0) is CentOS, and so the "easy" install should be another instance of virtualized CentOS, although any variant should be usable. I tried to use virt-install, but it failed miserably.

First, I had issues with networking. Even when I resolved those, halfway through anaconda installing packages, the system crashed.

Caveats for me included the fact that my bridge was virbr0 instead of xenbr0. I have a xenbr0, it just wasn't the correct bridge for RFC1918 going out...

Anyhow, aside from the networking problems, that went fairly smoothly. (Although the top of the guide has you selecting from i386 or x86_64, and the kickstart config just says i386, so I had to restart to correct that, since I was doing the x86_64 install.

Still on the agenda: getting a real IP address. Voxel offered a reasonable extra 8 IPs for $4/mo, and we'd like to ensure each VPS has its own IP address, not 192.168 addresses that translate.

Still, this has been a pretty fun thing so far. I've heard that Xen is what Amazon is using to provide AWS, and I've been learning a lot of new linux tools (like brctl; I'd never had a reason to do linux bridging prior to now, even though I've done it plenty with networking devices).